Before he could go on, Rose dismissed him with a flick of her fingers. “No. There’s nothing to discuss there, since you don’t even consider what they were doing to me to be a crime. This is just a distraction to try to take us in without causing too much chaos. But I promise you, if I have to defend myself and my consorts, it won’t be subtle. Do you really want half of Manhattan finding out that witching society exists?”

  Of course. That was why they’d cleared the street. There didn’t seem to be anything her Assembly hated more than the idea of regular people finding out about their secret magic. The hawkish guy’s jaw had tightened. I smiled to myself even though my shoulders stayed tensed. Rose had his number, all right.

  “I’d rather it didn’t come to that,” he said.

  “So would I,” Rose said. “We don’t want to hurt anyone at all, even you. We’d just like to be left alone to live our lives. We aren’t any threat to you if you leave us alone. Is there any chance at all of negotiating that?”

  The man paused, and I could see in his expression that the answer was, No way in hell. Rose must have seen that too, not that she’d probably had much hope in the first place. Her left foot slid slightly behind her in the witch version of a fighting stance.

  The man’s fingers twitched with a gesture so quick I almost didn’t catch it, and the figures around us whirled into motion.

  The air sizzled with waves of magic. My pendant quivered harder against my skin. Rose flung out her arms and swiveled on her feet, throwing out her own magic to shield us, to knock our attackers down.

  My hand jerked from my pack. My pulse thudded in my ears.

  One, two, three of the enforcers toppled over at Rose’s strike. But two more were rushing closer, the magic their hands were forming so potent it visibly glowed. Rose spun toward one, and my hand snapped up. I didn’t let myself think, just pulled the trigger.

  The pistol recoiled in my hand with a hitch I’d almost forgotten in the months since I’d last gone to the range for target practice. I’d never had to fire a gun in an actual fight. The shot thundered in the air, and the bullet slammed into the witch’s shoulder. Blood bloomed stark red across her yellow T-shirt.

  The woman cried out. The hawkish man who’d lead the group had whipped around at the sound. When he saw her wound, his face darkened. My gut clenched as he jabbed his hand toward us.

  “Damon,” Seth said through his teeth, but another hail of spells was already descending on us, even faster and sharper than before. Gabriel stumbled to the side, his hand jerking to his temple, and I swung around. Make them regret this. Make them back off. Make them scared of people hearing and coming to see the magic they were throwing around. I didn’t care, as long as I got some of it done.

  I fired off three more shots in quick succession: bang, bang, bang. My aim was shakier now. One bullet clipped a woman’s thigh, another sent up a puff of brick dust where it dinged a shop corner, and the last—the last slammed into the chest of one of the guys waving his magic baton.

  His body crumpled. My stomach flipped over with a lurch, and then our remaining attackers heaved a searing blaze of magic toward us.

  Rose whirled around faster than I’d ever seen her, the air singing with her own magic, but even that wasn’t fast enough. I rocked backward on my feet, little barbs of heat digging through my skull and rattling my thoughts, and Jin yelped at her other side. Rose’s arms whipped out. Her feet pattered against the ground as she moved through the form of her spell, and in another instant the barbs fell away. A wash of cold swept away from her and collided with the enforcers and the hawkish man, toppling them.

  Jin swore, holding his arm. I caught a glimpse of it: the sleeve of his shirt charred, the skin all down from there mottled with red blisters. An angry red mark slashed across his neck.

  “Come on, come on,” Rose was saying, choked and breathless. “I don’t know how long they’ll be out for. We’ve got to go.”

  She wove her fingers in the air over Jin’s arm with a few darting circles, and the redness faded to a still painful-looking pink. He nodded sharply as if to say that was enough for now, and we all took off around the nearest corner.

  “Put that away,” Seth gritted out beside me.

  The gun. I still had it clutched against my sweating palm. I shoved it in the pack before we came onto the next street. The witches hadn’t cleared that one. Ordinary people were standing all around, many of them staring our way. How much had they seen and heard? Did it even matter now?

  “You should get rid of it completely,” Seth muttered as we hustled past those gaping faces to another street over. “That was the stupidest move I’ve seen from you yet.”

  “I took a couple of them down,” I said.

  “You pissed them off even more,” he said. “Now they think we’re dangerous too. Maybe too dangerous to even try to keep any of us alive.”

  He was just being the same old buzzkill Seth he always was. I told myself that, but my pulse hiccupped as I glanced at Rose.

  She looked back at me, her expression tight. “I know what you meant to do. You were just trying to help protect us. It’s okay.”

  She said that, but my stomach sank anyway, because I could hear the fear in her voice—not of me, I didn’t think, but of what her Assembly might do next. As we ran on, our feet pounding the concrete, the image of the one guy falling with a bullet hole in his chest replayed in my memory.

  I’d had to do it. I’d had to. But my gut sank even lower with each repetition.

  I just had to hope I’d helped things more than hurt them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rose

  I stopped in a little courtyard between a couple of shops. We’d come several blocks, and no reaching whisper of magic had touched me yet. I didn’t know how severely I’d taken down the enforcers, but they obviously weren’t bouncing back quickly.

  My heart was still thumping away twice as fast as normal, adrenaline singing through my veins. The lingering sweetness of blueberry jam from my breakfast had turned sour in my mouth.

  The guys came to a halt around me. I immediately turned to Jin. He was holding his arm a little away from his chest—any contact must have still been painful. Sucking in my breath, I motioned him closer and studied the mottled burns that streaked down his skin from his neck to his wrist.

  “They’re not so bad now,” he said, but the rough note in his voice gave him away. They were hurting him even without any contact.

  “I can do a better job of healing them,” I said. “Now that we’re out of the line of fire.”

  I worked the magic with my hands over his body, knitting together the broken flesh and cooling the sting as well as I could. Jin’s shoulders had come down half an inch by the time I was finished, so I guessed I’d done an all right job.

  He flexed the muscles and turned his arm one way and then the other. “Good as new,” he said with a smile, even though pink marks still mottled his olive-brown skin like scars. I wasn’t sure those would ever fade completely.

  Imagining how much damage that spell might have done if he hadn’t been wearing his protective pendant made my stomach churn.

  “Is anyone else hurt?” I asked, glancing around at the other guys. In the chaos of the fight, I wasn’t sure I’d been able to keep track of everyone’s injuries.

  I got nods all around. Gabriel cleared his throat. “I think maybe we should talk about other lines of fire.” He cocked his head at Damon. “Bringing a gun to a magic fight—maybe something it’d have been good to discuss with the rest of us ahead of time?”

  He said it in his usual calm, almost gentle way of chiding, but Damon immediately bristled. “What, so you all could have freaked out and told me to ditch it? I know I do things differently from the rest of you, but some of the things I’ve learned are actually useful when you’ve got murderous witches after you, you know. I’m probably ten times better prepared for protecting myself against anyone this vicious than any of you are.”

  His voice was brash, but I saw a twitch of his eyelid that made me think he wasn’t as certain as he was trying to sound. Seth had already laid into him about the gun. I wasn’t all that crazy about Damon going around with a weapon like that either—the crack of it firing still jittered through my nerves whenever I remembered it—but it wasn’t as if he’d necessarily hurt our attackers any more than my own magic had. So, who was I to judge, exactly?

  I took Damon’s hand. “I meant what I said before. I’m glad you had it so you could help fight back. I have no idea what the Assembly people after us are going to make of it… but there’s not much we can do about that now, right?”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. His fingers squeezed mine and then let go. There was something pained in his expression that I didn’t like.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He gave me a smile that looked a little forced. “It’ll take more than those bastards to get me down, angel.”

  I didn’t think he’d respond well to being pressed harder, especially when the other guys were already on that job.

  “Can I just say I’d like to know if you picked up any more exciting items from those associates you met up with yesterday?” Kyler said with a tight grin.

  “I got a few pistols,” Damon said. “In case anyone decided they wanted to go into these fights armed too. So we’re not leaving Rose to do all the work.”

  My stomach flipped right over. “Hey,” I said, and waited until he met my eyes again. “I’m not doing all the work anyway. I need you—all of you. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be a miserable slave to a consort who hated me. So don’t for one second think you haven’t done enough.”

  “What do we do now?” Seth asked into the silence that followed. “They know we’re in New York. Should we hit the road again?”

  “Where would we go?” Gabriel said. “We’d still have the same problems. We came here because Rose thought there were people who’d help.” He tipped his head to me. “Do you think we should risk meeting up with that woman from the shop?”

  I inhaled and exhaled slowly, gathering my thoughts. “It’s almost time for us to meet her at the park anyway. I don’t think the people after us will attack us again right away—they never have before. They’ll need time to decide on another plan.” One of the few times the Assembly’s bureaucracy had benefitted me. “You’re right. We have to see if we can find people who’ll help us, information we can use against them, or we’ll end up losing no matter where we go. But let’s hurry. If we’re lucky, she’ll get there early and we won’t have to stick around here too long.”

  We flagged a couple of cabs—no way were we all squeezing into one—and I sat on the edge of my seat as the driver wove through the streets and crossed over the bridge back to Staten Island. The taxi dropped us off at the edge of the park.

  A salt-laced breeze blew through the trees from the shoreline I couldn’t see. A few kids were playing on the playground while their parents watched. I checked the signs and led the guys between the scattered trees to a signpost I could see in the distance near a thicker stretch of forest. That was where Margo Elands had said we should meet her.

  When we were close, I motioned for the guys to stop. “I think you should let me wait for her alone. She sounded a little weirded out by the whole public meeting thing… I don’t want her to get overwhelmed.”

  “We’ll be right here if you need us, Sprout,” Gabriel said. Kyler gave me a playful salute.

  Leaving them behind sent a tug through my chest, even though I was only walking about twenty feet away from them. They’d be able to see me the whole time; I’d be able to look over at them. And it wasn’t as if I couldn’t defend myself or was likely to need to against the expert on historical witching oddities.

  No, it was just that it didn’t feel good acting as if they shouldn’t be standing beside me. As if I were ashamed of who I’d taken as my consorts, when that wasn’t true in the slightest.

  “I’ve got your back too,” Philomena said, blinking into being to stroll along beside me. She gave me a wink and twirled her sun umbrella. The last few times she’d appeared, she’d looked a little translucent. I thought maybe she’d faded a little more. It seemed rude to call attention to that, though.

  “Thank you for the company,” I said dryly.

  “Oh, I mean it. You should see what I can do with a parasol when threatened.”

  I had to smile. “I believe it.”

  I sat down on the picnic table near the signpost to wait. Apparently Margo had shown up early. As soon as my bottom hit the wooden boards, a stout figure with a short-sleeved cardigan pulled over a pastel flowered dress emerged from the thicker woods to join me.

  “Now there is a witch,” Phil murmured, and I couldn’t argue that.

  Margo Elands fit the look of a stereotypical witch so well she’d probably made every faction of the Assembly cringe at least a little. Her dress might have been in pastels, but she had a knob of a chin and a jutting pointed nose, her eyes dark and deep-set. Her coarse wavy hair was a mix of gray and white, but I could tell from a few flecks still remaining that it had once been a dark mahogany brown. I guessed from the lines on her face and the slight stiffness with which she walked that she was in her sixties and a little worse for wear.

  “My mysterious anonymous friend?” she said, looking me up and down.

  I hadn’t given her my name or any identifying details in case the Assembly had been monitoring her. “Yes. Ms. Elands?”

  She waved that name off. “Margo is fine. What can I do for you, dear? I take it this isn’t just about you wanting something from the shop.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “Although—has everything been all right? When I saw the shop was closed, I couldn’t help worrying.”

  She shrugged. “I’m starting to get a little arthritis in my joints. Sometimes it acts up enough to be a problem, and I take a couple days to rest. I don’t get so many regulars at the shop that it usually disturbs anyone.”

  “Well, nothing suspicious about that,” Philomena said. “You were worried for nothing.”

  A breath of relief rushed out of me. Nothing I’d done had gotten Margo into any trouble. Assuming this meeting didn’t.

  I resisted the urge to glance over at my guys. If she hadn’t already noticed me arriving with them, it was probably better not to draw her attention to them.

  Her eyes had already sharpened anyway. “What exactly did you think might have happened to me?”

  “Well, I…” I rubbed my mouth. There wasn’t an easy way to put this. “The best I can explain it is I’ve gotten into some trouble with the Assembly. Or at least part of the Assembly that’s dealing out their own justice without anyone else knowing much about it. I know you’ve had some… issues with the more conservative members in the past?”

  Margo’s sturdy body had stiffened. “They didn’t like some of the things I dug up and talked about from our past. That’s why I’m living out here and not in Seattle the last twenty years. Can’t say I miss them much. But you don’t want to mess with them, young witch. I promise you, you don’t.”

  “Vaguely foreboding,” Phil said, wrinkling her nose. “Not very helpful, madam.”

  I didn’t have any humor left after that warning. Tension wrapped around my chest. “I don’t want to mess with them. But they seem set on messing with me. I just want them to back off. I was hoping maybe from your time there, from dealing with them, you might have some advice on how to maneuver around them, or find their weak spots, or—”

  Margo was shaking her head. “I don’t want to get mixed up in this,” she said, taking a step back. “I didn’t come out too badly from the trouble I got into. I’d like to keep what I still have.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I said quickly. “I wouldn’t ask you to stick your neck out. After you leave the park, you can forget you ever saw me. It’s just, if there’s anything you could say that might help…”

  A pleading note had crept into my voice. I winced inwardly at it. But Margo hesitated.

  “They’re not all bad, you know,” she said. “I had plenty of friends in the Assembly. It just doesn’t do much good when the ones who crack the whip have their heads on backward. You want them off your tail? That’s all?”

  I nodded. “I’d disappear from witching society, just keep to myself and stay away, if they’d let me.”

  She sighed. “Well, I can tell you this much: If your spark is kindled, you’d better keep your magic to yourself. They’ve refined the art of tracing magicking at a distance over the years. And not just that magic was worked but by who, as if you’ve left your signature on it. You cast a spell, and they’ll know your general area. Cast a couple more, and they’ll pinpoint you exactly. I’d imagine that’s how they’ve followed you so far. You want to disappear? You keep that power under wraps.”

  She gave me a sharp bob of her head and turned. “Thank you!” I called after her as she hurried off. My throat had gone tight.

  The enforcers could trace my magicking. Then every spell I’d cast to build our shield, to enchant our pendants, to heal my consorts in the last few days—I’d been drawing our enemies to us every time.

  Could I possibly keep us far enough ahead of them to wait them out now without casting a single spell?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rose

  Gabriel pulled the SUV into the lot at the fringes of the suburban park. I peered from the window at the stretch of manicured grass and flower beds, the paths winding elegantly between the trees. A lot more upkeep went into this place than the park where I’d met Margo.

  We were north of New York City proper now, among neighborhoods of huge houses with sprawling lawns and more golf courses than I could count. Closer to the kind of society I’d grown up in, but I couldn’t say I felt all that comfortable.

  I turned to look at Kyler, who was watching his phone in the seat behind me. “Anything?”

 

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